Quiet Candor as I Grew Wise: Psychology of Wisdom

Think about the smartest person you know. What about the wisest person you know? Are they the same? Probably not. You might even think of incredibly smart people who aren't wise, and very wise people who few would like especially smart. What can the gap between intelligence and wisdom teach us? While there's certainly debate, often we reduce intelligence to a single score. But wisdom feels harder to pin down: how we hold uncertainty, how we learn from what life throws at us, how we treat other people when things get complicated. This activity asked you to reflect upon two deeply connected dimensions of psychological growth into adulthood. Perry's stages of intellectual development invite you to examine how you think about knowledge itself. Whether you tend to see the world in clear rights and wrongs, or you're sitting more comfortably with complexity and context. Webster's Self-Assessed Personality of Wisdom Scale (SAWS) asks something broader: how wisely do you tend to move through your life: emotionally, relationally, and reflectively? Neither scale is a test you pass or fail. They're mirrors. And what makes them worth looking into is what research has found: both the way we think about knowledge and the wisdom we bring to living are not fixed traits we're born with. They're capacities we develop through adversity, and ones that matter for how we flounder and flourish through those challenges.

William Perry (1970) identified four distinct mindsets forming a framework for how we make sense of knowledge and truth over time.

Dualism reflects a belief the world is neatly divided into right and wrong, good and bad — and that authorities (teachers, parents, experts) hold the correct answers. If you scored higher here, you may tend to look to others for definitive truths rather than sitting with ambiguity.

The stage of Multiplicity is when we begin to notice people disagree, a lot. Even about things we never considered debatable. And that maybe everyone's opinion is just as valid as anyone else's. A higher score suggests you're in the exciting (and sometimes disorienting) discovery that truth isn't as simple as you once thought. Even if you haven't yet found a framework to sort through competing ideas, you're feeling empowered to think for yourself and question received wisdom.

Relativism is the recognition knowledge is contextual — good thinking involves weighing evidence, considering perspective, and reasoning carefully rather than just picking a side. A higher score here suggests you've developed a more nuanced repertoire of ways to get to truth. But since each technique brings us to different answers, we're almost forced to acknowledge everybody has a point of view. You have your truth. Me mine. And all truths are equally valid.

Commitment is where our journey through stages comes full circle in a richer way: making thoughtful commitments to values, beliefs, and identities. Not because they're the only "right" answers, but because we've wrestled with complexity and chosen a path anyway. A higher score suggests a kind of grounded confidence that can hold uncertainty without being paralyzed by it.

It might seem like commitment is two-faced. Like we know all knowledge is relative, but still commit to the "one true way." But that's not what we mean by commitment. Let me share a concrete example.

Freud sucks.

It's exasperating to me when people think Freud is the "father of psychology" and he's somehow what psychology is about.
But Freud built his developmental theory on six case studies. Freud’s case studies were his clients - all adults - and he dramatically interprets how he understands those clinical sessions to explain childhood. Freud is the sole interpreter of his data and he even destroyed his contemporaneous notes preventing anyone from providing an alternative explanation.

Back in graduate school, I attended a friend's dissertation defense and psychoanalysis was central to her study of literature.

Is she dumb? Is her field a fraud???

No.

I could see, for her, Freud provided a rich language for talking about literature. All compelling stories are about conflict, and the deepest conflicts are inside ourselves. And the id, ego, and superego vividly illustrate this conflict. It's a shared language among literary scholars and that makes it valuable. To me, then a graduate student of psychology, it's so important to me our models accurately reflect reality. I can appreciate she has another commitment, and still hold my own in my context today as a psychology professor.

Interpreting Our Results

Please reflect about yourself and your scores with table 1. I score really low in dualism (2.80) which makes sense to me. I personally love talking with people who are quite different than me. But what somebody acts like their truth is the truth, I find myself stepping back. My example above illustrates why my highest score is commitment (6.83). What I find myself most curious about is my multiplicity (5.00) is higher than relativism (3.60). It's probably how the items land for me. To me, the relativism items bring to mind examples of people judging others and they bring me pause. But the multiplicity items appeal to the value I place in finding our own voice, and being true to our authentic selves.

Jefferey Dean Webster (2003) sees wisdom as a way of approaching life, a personality, that comes with experience. Bringing together ideas about wisdom across cultures, he identified a living, multidimensional practice of five dimensions.
Your overall score reflects a broad sense of how wisely you move through life, drawing upon humor, emotional depth, reflection, openness, and hard-won experience all at once. It's not a grade. Think of as a portrait of where you are right now in your ongoing relationship with yourself and the world.

Humor: This isn't about being funny. It's about the kind of humor bringing people together and finds the bittersweet absurdity in life's harder moments. A higher score suggests you use levity as a form of warmth, resilience, and connection. Not as a shield or a weapon.

Emotion: Wise emotion isn't about staying calm. It's about welcoming the full emotional spectrum, understanding what your feelings are trying to tell you, and expressing them in ways serving you and the people around you. A higher score here suggests you've learned to sit with discomfort rather instead of running from it.

Reminiscence and Reflection captures your ability to look back at your life with curiosity and meaning. To let your past experiences become a lens that clarifies, rather than burdens, your present. A higher score suggests you're someone who actively learns from your own story.

Openness here means more than trying new things. It's a genuine curiosity about people and ways of living different than your own and a willingness to be changed by what you encounter. A higher score suggests you approach the unfamiliar with more interest than anxiety.

The Critical life Experience subscale honors the fact that wisdom is often forged through difficulty. Navigating major life transitions, making morally complex decisions, and coping with problems that don't have answers. A higher score reflects the depth of experience you've accumulated and, importantly, how meaningfully you have engaged with it.


Interpreting Our Results

Please reflect about yourself and your scores with table 2. Several things strike me about this activity. Generally, my scores are like my students across activities, but not here. Four of the five dimensions are "clear strengths" for me. And that probably reflects I've lived longer than most of my students, I like psychology including self-reflection, and my score for critical life experiences is nearly 6. The activity helped me reflect about my humor. I never like humor that tears somebody down and my reaction to sarcasm is, disproportionate. And, amusingly, it reminded me of a paper I wrote about sharing personal stories in the classroom and realizing every humorous example I have is self-deprecating (Grobman, 2015). And I realize it comes from my desire to connect with my students. Worrisome, despite high scores, my emotion score was below average. I know I've often held hard feelings at a distance. The experience creating this activity, as well as other personal struggles, and me back to therapy. And when I redid the activity recently, years later, I can see my growth.

Perry's stages and Webster's personality are two ways we can explore development into adulthood. And both approaches intertwine with other aspects of who we are.

Perry's stages of intellectual development

The way we think about knowledge - where answers come from, how certain we can be, and whose voice counts as truth - turns out to say a lot about who we are as thinkers and people. Perry's research, originally conducted with college students and later extended across cultures and life stages, describes a journey from a world of clear right and wrong answers toward a more complex, contextual understanding of truth. What makes this finding genuinely exciting is movement through the stages isn't just an intellectual shift. It ripples outward into our relationships and emotional lives. Lovell (1999) found students at higher Perry positions had formed greater capacity for empathy, particularly the ability to step into someone else's perspective and truly understand it from the inside. And the connection was so strong that cognitive empathy and cognitive complexity may essentially be the same construct. Research linking Perry stages to tolerance for ambiguity tells a similar story: the more comfortable you become with complexity in how you think, the more comfortable you tend to become with complexity in people (Budner, 1962; King & Kitchener, 1994). If you scored high on Relativism or Commitment, you may already recognize this in yourself.

What actually moves people through Perry's stages is one of the most practically useful things research has uncovered. It isn't simply time or IQ. Students whose courses deliberately engaged them with value-challenging material advanced nearly a full Perry position in a single semester, compared to modest gains in traditional courses (Stephenson & Hunt, 1977). Study abroad programs, mentoring relationships, and sustained encounters with people whose worldviews differ meaningfully from our own have shown similar effects (Drew, 1990; Pascarella & Terenzini, 1991). Simmons (2008) found that formal education and meaningful work experience predicted higher Perry scores, while age alone did not: a reminder growth is driven by what you engage with, not simply how long you've been alive. Baxter Magolda's (1992, 2001) remarkable twenty-year longitudinal study found many people don't reach the most integrated, self-authored forms of thinking until their late twenties or thirties, and that real-life challenges outside the classroom often matter just as much as formal education. So wherever you find yourself in Perry's framework right now, the most important question isn't where you are — it's what experiences you're willing to lean into.

Webster's Personality of Wisdom

Wisdom turns out to be among the consequential things psychology has found a way to measure. Higher scores on Webster's personality measure (SAWS) predict greater psychological well-being (r = .46), a greater willingness to forgive rather than hold grudges, and higher life satisfaction (Taylor et al., 2011). Among college students specifically, humor, perceived stress, and social skills together emerged as the strongest predictors of life satisfaction, with wisdom woven through each of them (Rezaei & Mousanezhad Jeddi, 2020). Krafcik's (2015) in-depth qualitative study of people nominated by their communities as genuinely wise painted a vivid portrait: these individuals were humble, spiritually grounded, deeply honest, and profoundly open to experience. What stood out most was their relationships. They had meaningful, long-term connections with mentors and loved ones, and they were quietly but powerfully influential in the lives of others. Webster and colleagues (2018) found that wiser people are more likely to search for and find meaning in their lives, and when they look back on hard memories, they tend to search for lessons and insight rather than simply trying to feel better about what happened. Perhaps most reassuringly, research consistently shows wisdom is less about how old you are and more about how deeply you've reflected. Which means it's genuinely available to you, right now, at any age.

The most hopeful thread running through wisdom research is that it grows, and we're beginning to understand how.
Mindfulness practice, particularly programs based on Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction, meaningfully improved the reflective and emotional regulation dimensions of wisdom (Le and Wadsworth, 2011). People who processed difficult life experiences with growth-oriented reflection - asking what this experience taught them, how it changed their perspective, what it revealed about what matters -increased their wisdom over time, while those who simply tried to find a silver lining did not (Weststrate et al., 2016). And when adversity is processed through meaning-making and perspective-taking, it can itself become a source of wisdom (Weststrate et al., 2018). Mentorship emerges as a powerful catalysts; wisdom exemplars named their relationships with mentors as the single most important factor in their own development (Krafcik, 2015). Even the connection between wisdom and humor is worth sitting with. Not humor that deflects or diminishes, but the kind that finds the bittersweet, absurd, tender truth in life's hardest moments. Taken together, the research suggests wisdom isn't a trait you either have or don't. It's a set of practices and orientations you can cultivate, one reflection, one honest conversation, one willingness to feel something fully at a time.

If there's one thing research into both Perry's stages and wisdom makes clear, it's this: growth is possible, and it's more available to you than you might think. You don't have to wait until you're older, or smarter, or have lived through more. What the evidence points to again and again is the quality of your engagement — with ideas that challenge your assumptions, with people whose lives look different from yours, with the hard experiences you've already had and maybe haven't yet fully made sense of. The student who sits with a genuinely difficult question rather than reaching for the easiest answer is already practicing something. The person who lets themselves feel something hard and asks what it's trying to teach them is already doing wisdom work. Wherever your scores landed today, they represent a snapshot, not a sentence. Perry's framework reminds us that intellectual development is a lifelong journey. One that often accelerates at exactly the moments we feel most unsettled. And wisdom research reminds us the mentors we seek out, the reflective habits we build, and the willingness we bring to life's complexity are among the most powerful investments we can make in our own becoming. So the most important question isn't where you scored. It's what you're going to do with what you noticed.

Uneasy Feelings about Your Results?
Please remember your results with any activity are not who you are. Your results are a 'snapshot' of a moment when you did an activity. It's just one measure, a single thread, of the many strands of who you are. Any result is a guess with statistical error. And it's possible the measure is flawed in a way so it doesn't work for you. Please do not think of your results as definitive dogma. Instead they're a starting point for our self reflection. Please keep in mind too, self-reflection can feel uncomfortable. "Bad" feelings are not actually bad. They're information. So, even if your activity result is inaccurate and flawed, you might ask yourself what your feeling is trying to tell you? Trusted teachers, friends, and therapists can be helpful. I wrote an essay elaborating with concrete examples how we can appreciate uneasy feelings about our activity results.

Scholarly Information?
You're welcome to use Copernican Revolution activities and essays for your thesis and studies. Having information about scholarly aspects like psychometric data, activity design details, and norm calculations may help. The primary focus of my essays is connecting educated laypersons with psychology. To help people like you, with advanced academic interests, I add an appendix with each activity.